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MALE DISPOSABILITY – The Suicide Epidemic in the Army

There is an epidemic of suicide among active duty military and recent veterans, it’s been going for a couple of years now, and no one has any clear idea what the cause might be. That is, clear enough to be useful for dealing with the problem; everyone has some idea that nearly ten years of war with so small a force that it requires multiple deployments of the same people, that this deployment schedule grinds up families and destroys lives, that jobs are next to impossible for returnees to find in an economy that has had the equity mined out of it for the last couple of decade; that all that is sooner or later going to send a really big social bill.

There is not only a gender element to this suicide epidemic and to the lack of a sense of urgency in the general public over it – male suicide is a big yawn for most people – there is also a class aspect to it. The military generally draws from demographic that are not centers of voting power, unless they are being manipulated on abortion or guns or whatever, or are on the screen of opinion-makers.

I heard some general say this morning on NPR that in 28 years of active service he has never faced any situation or opponent so intractable as the suicide epidemic. And I don’t have much to add to that.

So now the Army is looking at a nasal spray that gets thyrotrophin to the brain. Apparently it has some role in the regulation of emotions. The spray form is necessary because the brain picks the hormone up very poorly if it is delivered in other forms.

Then the day before that I noticed this article on the role of a common parasite in suicides and suicide attempts.Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite implicated in an increased risk of suicide or attempted suicide in pregnant women. It’s a common parasite in humans, about a fifth of the US population harbors it, and it has been linked to changes in the brain associated with suicide attempts. Toxoplasmosis is implicated in a whole range of of neural neurological troubles – ADHD, OCD, schizophrenia and even brain cancer. One study showed that if you tested positive for the parasite, you were seven times likelier to attempt suicide than if not. Apparently this is true only for specific strains of the parasite; other strains cause other effects.

Synchronicity is the only connection between any of these. I don’t have much to offer in the fight against the military suicide epidemic other than to help get the word out.

Male disposibility par excellence. I guess those babies better suck it up, “man up” and surrender their foreskins to the knife! Damn selfish babies! *last part is snark if anyone must know*

Ginkgo

Thanks for catching that. teh battele is heating up again. There was that court case in Germany that upended the country, and some last ditch efforts by paleos to increase the rate of circumcisison, although I think it’s mostly adults they are aiming at.

Clarence

As far as male suicides in the military, I really they are a combination of any/all of these things:

A. Combat stress and trauma
B. The military stresses family life. Not only in the “multiple deployment” department (which keeps deployed people from their loved ones for long periods of time), but also in how easy they make divorce theft. Remember F&F is still fighting in some states to get bills passed protecting deployed personells rights in family court.
C. The combination of chivalry and feminism which forms the military’s sexual harassment and anti-rape policies. Male sexuality is demonized, male guilt assumed, and there are very few allowable formal outlets for male sexual urges, esp. now that prostitution is outlawed.Male soldiers tend to be young, lonely, and extremely horny unless you mess with their drinking water and such things. But sex in the army for most men – esp with your fellow female soldiers – is frought with risk.
D. The fact that the reason they are dying is not always easily explained to them and not always believed by them. They aren’t fighting a conventional war, they are stuck acting as modified police forces against insurgents in isolated outposts.
E. Lack of support by the larger society. While they aren’t spit on as probably was the case with at least a few returning Vietnam vets, they are mostly ignored, while the government continues to repay their years of service – some well beyond their initial contracts – with indifference and treachery in terms of medical treatments and benefits they were promised.

Given all this its no wonder that suicides are soaring. The real miracle is that there aren’t more. Needless to say the armed services would rather medicate the problem away if they can, rather than even begin to addressing root causes.

Dungone

It’s pretty simple. One year in combat is ten years in civilian life. That’s the rule of thumb we had in my platoon for how much fucked up shit would happen to you during that time. If you increase the usual causes, then you increase suicide. It’s not much of a puzzle as to why. But solving it is the intractable part. When these generals are saying its a tough problem, it’s because they are staring at every single thing that is wrong with the way in which our society treats men. The military cant hope to solve that issue. And the only other solution is to disband and to throw it all back at society in general to unfuck the status quo.

http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com Stoner With a Boner

that read on toxoplasma gondii was just insane….

seems it increases dopamine levels which might help some people…

mentioned that it can reduce anxiety/fear in some people….

Skidd

And here I always thought having a pet cat was supposed to reduce stress.

Ironically, using an automated litter box or scrubbing a litter box too much actually stresses out cats (In short, they feel they lose control because what a cat owns is determined by it’s scent, and having one’s own scent eradicated every time you put it out is maddening) and can result in pretty extreme behavior issues at worst. Aaah, toxoplasmosis.

Dungone

Gingko, in some of your links there is a general quoted as saying in 37 years he hasn’t faced a bigger enemy. Is that a different man from the one on NPR? He also says, further in that quote, that he views the problem as not only facing the military, but thousands of civilians as well. I liked that he said this. I don’t like that this is so often painted as a military issue. And I say that as a veteran who dealt with several suicides in my own platoon. Because people seem to have a way of ‘othering’ military suicide as something that is caused by mysterious reasons that would have never existed outside of the military.

Do you believe for a minute that if, let’s say, women in prison were committing suicide, that this would be considered just a prison issue and not a broader women’s issue? This happens all the time for male suicide, though. It’s a result of a lot of special pleading that make men’s issues invisible in our society. It’s really important to tie military suicide with the rest of male suicide, as the underlying causes are often the same. You can’t fix one without fixing the other. Really, that’s just the truth of the matter.

Ginkgo

dungone, it is probably the same guy. I caught that on the way to work in traffic and I may have gotten the number of years wrong. OTOH he may just be one of many who are saying the same thing.

Clarence, that’s a good list of factors.

dungone, you really capture it here.
“But solving it is the intractable part. When these generals are saying its a tough problem, it’s because they are staring at every single thing that is wrong with the way in which our society treats men. The military cant hope to solve that issue. And the only other solution is to disband and to throw it all back at society in general to unfuck the status quo.”

Society needs to unfuck the way it treats men and it needs to rethink its relationship with its military. The relationship now is based on a consumerist model – “Well, they get paid for that, don’t they?” (No, honey,we aren’t all whores around here.) – rather than a citizenship model.

Dungone

Ginkgo, even before it became a volunteer military, our culture wasn’t treating the military as a citizenship role. It was treating it as a male chivalric duty to women. Military veterans were often denied the right to vote (whether through age, property ownership, race, immigration status, or any number of factors). Military service did not earn you a higher citizenship status such as it does in, say, Germany or in ancient Sparta or Athens. If you look at recruitment posters from a few generations ago, they often depicted some form of appeal to femininity, with Lady Liberty either being triumphant Or getting raped by the enemy. Then you had thenWhite Feathers. If you look at recruitment posters from the Korea and Vietnam era, it was about making “real men”. In fact, the USMC seems to have used variations of the “making men out of boys” meme as its main recruitment strategy for at least 50 years now. The early ones were pretty blatantly clear, while the new ones often focus on some mythical chivalric theme such as slaying a dragon. The message is pretty clear – society would like men to believe that it’s doing them a favor by allowing them to join the military, because otherwise they’d be some sort of worthless subhuman man-childs.

Tomek Kulesza

“Military service did not earn you a higher citizenship status such as it does in, say, Germany or in ancient Sparta or Athens”

It doesn’t/didn’t in any of these places, either.

Tomek Kulesza

“A. Combat stress and trauma
B. (…)”
I’d say this is the factor responsible for overwhelming majority of the variance. Say, 99%.

Clarence

““A. Combat stress and trauma
B. (…)”
I’d say this is the factor responsible for overwhelming majority of the variance. Say, 99%.”

Oh, bullshit, Tomek. You can’t separate potential years of loneliness or a guy who basically finds his wife cheated on him and now has custody of his kids so neatly from the battlefield. You can’t separate out the day to day boredom from the occasional small skirmishes and road bombs and accidents. You can’t separate the near total lack of support many of these guys get when they come home from the trauma on the battlefield they should be getting help with. All this stuff is related and is a toxic stew, each bit that makes it slightly more likely that a trauma in one area – say the battlefield- will spiral out of control.
Thanks for basically just saying “War is horrible, and if you didn’t go to war, you wouldn’t have these problems”. Heck, why don’t we just get rid of the military too while we are at it?

Clarence

I think I failed to also mention the privileged standards that women receive when it comes to combat requirements , assignments, and deferments.

Tomek Kulesza

“Oh, bullshit, Tomek. You can’t separate (…) ”
No. But i know that people subjected to that kind of stress (war), especially to that kind of that kind of stress (war full of uncertainity), especially for prolonged time, break down relatively consistently in huge numbers, which means it would happen almost regardless of other circumstances. And it’s not something new to this war(s). And it happens even to people that are prime examples of mental health before. Suicide is only the icing on the top of the cake, anyway.

That’s why i think other factors are – relatively – very minor.

“Thanks for basically just saying “War is horrible”
Uh, yes, that’s what i said. Why that’s a problem, tell me?

“and if you didn’t go to war, you wouldn’t have these problems”.
Sounds kind of victim-blamey for me, even if it’s true. And historically it wasn’t even often the case, conscription and stuff.

“Heck, why don’t we just get rid of the military too while we are at it?”
I’m not a pacifist. And I think the state should have monopoly on violent physical power. But yes, military is a necessary evil.

http://dannyscorneroftheuniverse.blogspot.com Danny

dungone:The early ones were pretty blatantly clear, while the new ones often focus on some mythical chivalric theme such as slaying a dragon. The message is pretty clear – society would like men to believe that it’s doing them a favor by allowing them to join the military, because otherwise they’d be some sort of worthless subhuman man-childs.
That is just it. That’s all a part of keeping men in their place. Lead us to believe that we need to do those things because that is what “real men” do. Hold up military service as the goal that men should reach for in order to prove their manhood and you will keep a steady supply of them.

(Could it be that the way that men are starting to see through this illusion has something to do with the falling numbers of the military?)

I didn’t get to look at your links Ginkgo but do they by chance mention how those soldiers are killing themselves? I ran a post at GMP a few days ago (http://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/why-so-violently/) on the topic of why men tend to pick more overtly violent methods to kill themselves. I think it’s pretty clear. We are taught to embrace the idea that violence is the answer so when all other options have failed and the time comes to end one’s life why not do it in the same vein of violence that was taught in life? Or are we supposed to believe that the violence that men are taught is done in a vacuum where the violence they do to others is a result of embracing violence but the violence they do to themselves just happens to be a result of picking more violent means?

Tomek Kulesza

“That is just it. That’s all a part of keeping men in their place”
I wouldn’t say it that way. The gender norms itself Dungone referenced to are the way to keep men the way society wants them to be.

The posters? That’s military or state propaganda latching on something that works because of the norms in order to recruit people into job that’s probably the single most shitty employment imaginable when not at peace.

But these norms exist regardless of it.

Also, the thyrotropin army response causes an me to silently laugh. Well, at least it’s not amphetamine or alcohol anymore. That’s progress!

Clarence

It’s a PROBLEM, Tomek, because it basically just states that nothing can be done, which is utter bullshit. It also seems to be absolving the federal government and its perfidity regarding veterans and their care from any responsibility.
Newsflash: suicides in the military have went up and up on a trajectory that does not seem to be stopping. Why? We’ve had other wars that have lasted years. We’ve had other wars such as Vietnam that were arguably more traumatizing. What’s so special now? Could it have anything to do with the cultural and legal changes in the military and/or the lack of aftercare that our soldiers fail to receive?

Tomek Kulesza

“It’s a PROBLEM, Tomek, because it basically just states that nothing can be done, which is utter bullshit.”
Even if, but if it’s true, then solving all the other issues won’t make a dent in that problem, so it’s not an improvement.

But it’s not stating that nothing can be done. There’s plenty of thing that can be done. And it certainly doesn’t:

“It also seems to be absolving the federal government and its perfidity regarding veterans and their care from any responsibility.”
On the contrary, it puts more burden on federal government than other factors, since this one is it’s solely responsibility, while the others aren’t.

“Newsflash: suicides in the military have went up and up on a trajectory that does not seem to be stopping. Why? We’ve had other wars that have lasted years”
And this was a problem. Are you aware how the term “shellshock” appeared? If yes, you can surely understand how that was the case in other (relatively recent, last 200 years) wars too? And if not, you will certainly find it interesting, as the society’s approach to the whole idea was much tangled in the whole masculinty issue.

“We’ve had other wars such as Vietnam that were arguably more traumatizing.”
Were there? There was a 1-year term in Vietnam, right? And there was more uncertainity… also, do you have any stats about Vietnam soldiers mental health or not?

“What’s so special now? Could it have anything to do with the cultural and legal changes in the military and/or the lack of aftercare that our soldiers fail to receive?”
I don’t know. I don’t pay close (more precisely: almost any) attention to that clusterfuck. I don’t even know what’s the scale of the intervention is right now. But i would look, at first, at the situation there. Are there manpower shortages, resulting in less off-duty time? Are soldiers getting more tours recently? In short, are they subjected to more of the combat stress? What’s the situation?

Ok, after browsing the article, few points:

1. The stats are gathered only since 2009.
2. Month-to-month comparison for this is not good statistics.
3. If i wanted to gauge whether my idea is wrong i’d look at the per capita rate for army and navy/airforce. Should be much higher in the army (i assume the other issues are the same for various branches and that navy/airforce don’t do duty
‘on the ground’)

Ginkgo

““We’ve had other wars such as Vietnam that were arguably more traumatizing.”
Were there? There was a 1-year term in Vietnam, right? And there was more uncertainity… also, do you have any stats about Vietnam soldiers mental health or not?”

Tomek, you are tight to ask about stats, but you have to remmeber who is keeping those stats and the conflict of interest involved. The same people tasked with caring for vets keep the stats, so they have an incentive to lie about the size of the problem.

When it comes to Vietnam vets, it took the federal government DECADES to admit to the problem with Agent Orange, so I hardly believe that the same government is going to be honest when it comes ot PTSD stats coming out of that war. But I can tell you this. The stereotype of the Vietnam vet is a war-shattered misfit – subject to “flashbacks” at any moment – who never got his life going after he came back.

Dungone

I do find the concept of citizen-soldiers to be highly problematic, as espoused within the Starship Troopers novel. I agree with Tomek that it’s never existed as such in real life and I’m not sure if it ever should. I used some examples because they came close in certain aspects. For example Germany has a jus sanguinis citizenship model where having a German veteran in your lineage ends up playing a hugely beneficial role in being allowed to become a citizen and obtain social safety nets. The US, as well as the Roman Empire, have a jus soli citizenship model which is far more exploitative in that there only exists the possibility of citizenship to those who agree to serve in the future/present. In the Roman Empire, an outsider could settle anywhere he wished within the Roman Empire after 25 years of military service. The subtle difference between these two models is that one doesn’t pressure foreigners to serve military interests in order to gain basic citizenship; yet it offers a clear reward to those who have service in their lineage, in many ways giving them advantages even over naturally born citizens.

As far as several of the ancient Greek city-states, they met citizen-soldier criteria because their militaries were oriented around civic duty, not necessarily around a chivalric duty that didn’t truly develop until much later. No special customs seemed to have been geared around protecting women’s honor, with the Helenic wars being debatable. Our modern military gives ode to the premise of creating model citizens that in a way, seems to view itself as if serving a function similar to that of the ancient city states. The stated mission of US Marine Corps boot camp, for example, is to create model citizens. The Marines take an incredible amount of pride in former Marines who have gone on to find success in later life, to the point of there being a mythology about what Marines put on their gravestones (“here lies a Marine… Also happened to be a CEO billionaire, cured cancer, elected president, etc etc”). The main problem is that this view is in no way reflected in the rest of our civic culture. The USMC creates model citizen-soldiers for a society where citizen-soldiers are mostly made to suffer a lifetime of hardship in utter anonymity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUv02VxAcNU MaMu1977

As a 10-year veteran, I’ll say that the most common thread in all military suicides is money issues (regardless of branch.) Jarheads and ground pounders (forward operators) have to deal with large amounts of job-related stress, but the majority of suicides occur among the the 0-2 deployment REMFs, and the most common trigger for their money issues was divorce. Military standards (re: divorce) are simple: children can receive up to 25% of the AD member’s pre-tax salary for CS, the divorcing spouse can receive up to 19% in alimony. Now, here are two examples of how military divorces play out.

Major DiSarei is a combat surgeon. He earns between $5500-6800/month (depending on deployment status.) His wife asks for a divorce. The brass *can’t afford* to lose a trained and deployable surgeon (never mind the fact that his still-alive great-grandfather served in SAO, his grandfather was an E-9 during Vietnam and his father and uncle are a retired Chief Master Sergeant and Colonel, respectively.) so they make their moves (including a reminder that the military courts can protect him from CS/alimony adjustments if he stays active duty.) At the end of the case, with the Major’s OK, the former Mrs DiSarei receives $2500/month in combined CS/alimony and his GI Bill benefits. He’s rendered non-deployable for a year, then is put on the short list for promotion once his deployability status is returned (and he’s removed from deployability to high-conflict areas, such as Iraq or Afghanistan.) He keeps $3000/month in his salary, plus $1000/month in incentive pay and $1800/month in housing and food allowances. In the end,

Major has $5800/month in his pocket
Ex and kids have $2500/month + $1000 to $1500/ month in GI Bill benefits, plus Tricare benefits
With planning, he can see them 3-4 times a year using military planes

Then, we have Sergeant Snuffy. Sgt. Snuffy is a literal GI, with a job that has limited to no application outside of the Service (bomb loader, for example.) He lives with his wife and kids in military housing and earns $3500/month. Like the Major, he also comes from a military family. However, his relatives were of much lower ranks (meaning that they don’t have as many connections as the Major’s “could talk to the right people and get my promotion scuttled” family. Sgt Snuffy’s wife asks for a divorce. The courts give her $1500/month in combined CS and alimony, dropping his take home pay to $1500/month after taxes. She also gets his GI Bill and the family car, meaning that any education that he wants to get, he’ll have to start getting it while he’s active duty (and now that he’s not part of a family, he’ll have to move off base and get a new car. Because he hasn’t been married over ten years, his wife doesn’t get Tricare (something that she considers a great injustice.) He earns another $1000/month for housing and food allowance, but his fuel costs rise proportionally due to the fact that the closest apartment to the base (that isn’t in a trailer park/housing project) is almost an hour away. Now, he has to wake up at 0430 to show up for morning PT, instead of leaving his base home at 0600 with a cup of coffee. Like the Major, his kids and former wife live half a country away. *Unlike* the Major, Sgt Snuffy is still deployable (no using government travel for him!), leading to the former Mrs telling people that her ex “doesn’t really care about the kids” on various internet forums and message boards. On top of that, the Major’s wife moved to the country, Sgt Snuffy’s wife moved to the city ($2500/month in the country purchases a lot more than $1500 in even a mid-level city, giving Sgt Snuffy’s ex even more ammunition to use against him.) And seeing as how the Sgt’s marriage ended relatively amicable, he takes on her complaints about the drop in their standard of living. On top of that, he was convinced to stay in the military “for the kids”, but there are rumours swirling around about an upcoming “washback” program that will remove a bunch of mid-level NCOs from the Service.

Sgt Snuffy, in the end, earns $2300/month, of which $1500 goes toward his rent, utilities, gas and car payment/repair bills.
The former Mrs earns $1500/month, but all of her money goes towards rent, making GI Bill usage a fantasy because she has to work to put food on the table, clothes on their backs and gas in her car.
Sgt Snuffy’s deployable status means that he gets to see his kids 0-1 times a year. Unlike the Major, he doesn’t have enough money to give them gifts when he *can* show up.
Because his ex-wife sees Sgt Snuffy living in a new apartment and driving a second car, she assumes that Sgt Snuffy’s standard of living has somehow increased, leaving her with no choice *but* to go on various websites to talk about how her ex is living in the “lap of luxury” while his kids eat Spam 5 days a week and wear knock-off clothing because “He doesn’t give a Damn about his kids.”
After a few months of not seeing his kids (but hearing about their misery), that survivors’ benefit begins to look like a cure for all of their problems…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUv02VxAcNU MaMu1977

Typo: SAO is supposed to be WWII

And, just to be clear, I know and am still friends with “Sgt Snuffy”. He earns $2800/month. He pays $750/month in rent, $350/month in utilities, $700/month in gas/car payments and $250/month for his former family’s TricarePrime health benefits. He gets deployed for at least 9 months out of every year and spends his deployment money on his kids (keeping what’s left over in a “just in case” fund. His wife *never* misses an opportunity to bad mouth him on Facebook and various military/military support websites for not keeping his family in “the manner to which they were accustomed.” Apparently, she didn’t take into account the fact that her creature comforts (nice house, no utility bills, wholesale food costs) were government benefits, that her husband was living on $100/week to allow her to buy everything that she wanted when they were still married, or that her chilimony would have to pay for those things when she became an Ex-Military Spouse. His sole reason for not committing suicide: neither of the children are related to him by blood, and he’ll have to pay $1000 less a month in chilimony starting in 2013 (he was able to find the fathers of both children on the internet. Due to her incessant barrage of abuse towards him, she became a minor internet meme. By bloviating against her ex, the *actual* fathers have seen the ex-wife, recognised the ex-wife and learned that they may have a child each and are willing to come forward.)

Believe me, this doesn’t happen very often. Most of the time, it ends with bloodshed.

And here’s some *more” (non-military, mostly) drama. On the first page, a woman comments in *shock* that her alcoholic/meth-addicted ex-husband can’t/won’t pay child support.

Ginkgo

Goddam, MaMu, that sounds like soap opera, but when you actually read through it, it is all very straight forward personnel stuff.

What a buzz saw.

Ginkgo

MaMu, that Op and thread are very interesting from a father’s rights perspective. a lot of women in there insisting that a child has a right to both parents, however that has to ee workled out, and that the father has a much right to access as the mother does. That surprises me frankly. That sounds like a pretty mainstream group there, not gender warriors, and I find that level of moral decency encouraging.

I think that story is a whitewash; I am sure it is very stressful on marriages. In the “Army Wives” soap (mentioned in the ABC report), she kept it a secret from her husband. That would be entirely possible if he is deployed for long periods.

I’m very curious about the divorce stats for the surrogate moms… I have not been able to find any follow-up on how well their marriages hold together afterward… (in fact, lack of follow-up info is true of ALL surrogate mothers, not just the military wives).

As with the Sgt Snuffy example, I am sure it isn’t officer’s wives selling their uteri.

Ginkgo

Daisy, I saw something recently saying that divorce stats were better for soldiers than the generla public, which astounded me, considering the strains those marriages are under.

My first take on it was it had to be something about the wives, since it was not the husbands who were making things easier – ! – and since it’s mainsy wives who initiate divorces anyway.

I think the difference is cultural, that military culture, and that includes the wives, puts such a premium on loylaty over personal benefit that it was afectingt eh dvorce rate. That’s without really looking into the situation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUv02VxAcNU MaMu1977

@Gingko

The sad part is, the sole reason for the military being willing to put pressure on his ex is due to his status. If my friend wasn’t working with Top Secret status, his money woes wouldn’t be an issue (but a person with access to lots of sensitive information and a distinct lack of money is a threat to national security.) If he was a cook or a mechanic, he wouldn’t matter at all. Long story short, I knew a *lot* of “standard” military personnel who were given the “You signed the certificate, so pay up and stop whining!”, drivel.

As far as fathers’ rights are concerned (re: the site), it comes across as, “I’m hot and can get laid, I need to make sure that someone trustworthy can take these kids off my hands on weekends.”/”*I’m supposed to be getting laid, not that bastard! If I can make him take care of the kids more often, he won’t have as much time to spend chasing after those dirty sluts!” I have dealt with a *lot* of acrimonious divorce cases in my day. When a woman’s needs are being met, she doesn’t complain at all.